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Lesson 5: Response to mashups and “non-text” user-generated content

This weeks lesson was on the topics of “non-text” user-generated content and Mashups. The first concept of “non-text” user generated content was one that I understood a little better then Mashups. “Non-text” user generated content is basically YouTube videos, photos, Pintrest pins, etc. I can relate to this type of content as I am an avid user of creating Instagram photos, posting photos on Facebook, repinning “Pins” on Pintrest, and watching YouTube videos. This concept of this kind of content being “information” or portraying a message is correct as this “non-text” content holds true to the fact that “a picture is worth 1000 words”. I enjoy using pictures to show what is going on in my life as they are a simple (visual) way of showing the world what can sometimes be complex things or something that I do not feel like writing about. I think that this kind of information would be something interesting for a library to try and catalogue as it would be a very interesting process of what a picture or a video means to one person (when the interpretation of it could be different to another).

The second concept covered this week was Mashups. I found the idea of it to be quite simple but when I read more in-depth about what it was I realized just how complicated or “layered” a topic it can be. I found playing around with the “Google Map Builder” in Google Maps to be a fun and interesting task and reading about all of the available map Mashups for libraries was interesting as well. However, as I mentioned before, it seems like this area could get very complicated as you would have to know how to combine or to edit these websites and I am not very knowledgeable in the technical areas that would be required to really play around and edit these programs. I would have to spend a lot of time learning about how to do it or play it safe and learn how to use the “Mashed-up” website that has already been created. Either way, this is a very useful topic to know about to better serve library patrons as you can use so many programs that they can utilize.